By Abigail Jones

Michael Gaillard pushes a roller of white paint against the walls of his already white art studio on 115th Street and Broadway. The small, square room is in a state of contained disarray. Scattered on the paint-stained floor are piles of oversized photographs, some as large as two by three feet, all taken with a large-format camera: images of his father, shirtless and aged; of his father’s arm, scarred from branding himself with the hot tip of a golf ball retriever; of water drying on the windows of a Nantucket Island ferry, the site of his grandfather’s suicide, the third in three generations of Gaillard men. The photos lie limply, stills from a tragic family legacy that Gaillard has spent his thirty years alternately sprinting toward and running from.

“I don’t really know what contentment is,” he says quietly, hunching his broad shoulders as he rolls another white band on the wall. “Every once in a while, I sit back and feel a moment of repose … but it’s hard for me to escape my mind. … It’s tough to be an artist and want everyone to like you. Sometimes I envy the artists who don’t give a fuck.”

A bluesy tune floats behind Gaillard as he speaks. He is good looking in a rugged, unkempt way, with a muscular body, a wide, toothy grin, and the kind of floppy hair that belongs on a boy. Routinely dressed in black t-shirts, baggy jeans, and handsome brown boots, his attire is a meticulous study in understatement and nonchalance. Gaillard is many things: a lifelong surfer, a basketball and pool player, a dreamer of titanic dreams, a tempered drinker, a storyteller. As a boy, he wore sailor stripes and collared shirts, artfully arranged the stuffed animals in his bedroom, and approached school projects with vigor and commitment. Since then, he has been constructing and interpreting the arc of his life. On any given day, he is a concoction of introspection, magnetism, and self-absorption, and speaks with an authority reminiscent of therapy (he never went past the first four visits). With a body of work that is intrinsically tied to his experiences, Gaillard has spent his entire life giving a fuck.

It is 5:00 p.m. on a chilly November afternoon, and for eight hours Gaillard has been preparing for Open Studios, the annual event for second-year students in the Masters of Fine Arts in visual arts at the Columbia University School of the Arts. Gaillard is one of three photographers in a class of 25, and as he repaints a nicely painted wall, it is clear that he sees his studio as part of his art. In here, everything has meaning. On his desk is a bottle of single malt scotch, two-thirds empty: a nod to his divergence from a family history of alcoholism. Tacked to the wall is the poem he wrote for a suicidal friend: a constant reminder of the line that Gaillard himself never crossed. Like his tiny Upper West Side apartment, a museum of artifacts from a childhood spent living on and longing for Nantucket, his studio is the place where he curates his life, making sense of who he is, where he came from, and how he escaped what he was predestined to be: a failure.

* * * *

From a nest of thick eyebrows and sunken wrinkles emerge two piercing blue eyes that won’t let you look away. Photographed from the shoulders up, Gaillard’s father, Michael Sr., stares at you as if someone has wrung the last drop of life out of him. Every pore, blood vessel, and imperfection is visible, and when you try to avert your glance, you can’t, because hanging to the left of the photograph is the same image, reproduced in the same size (27.5 inches by 22 inches), watching you with the same intensity. The moment your eyes drift to this second Michael Sr., the image on the right falls into the periphery, a ghostly shadow waiting for you to accept its gaze again.

“A photograph is a purveyor of embedded information and a vessel for the projections of the audience,” says Gaillard, speaking with his typical vocabulary of art theory and philosophy. It is the day of Open Studios, and he is wearing a spruced up version of his daily uniform (darker jeans and a dressier black shirt). Pristine and orderly, his room is packed with guests whispering with varying levels of authority about the large photographs and small installation pieces on display.

In an age when photographers are rapidly shifting to the digital format, Gaillard clings to his Wista metal field camera, a large-format film instrument that renders photos in exquisite detail, indulging his love of — and need for — perfection. The accordion-like machine, which sits on top of a tripod and produces negatives that are 4×5 inches, looks like it belongs in another century, but it has an understated elegance and bravado — just like Gaillard himself. “He will meticulously set up and compose and frame, slowly, with this clunky . . . camera,” says Johanna Wolfe, a fellow M.F.A. student at Columbia. It is “a more carefully considered, pre-meditated process. I think it fits in really well with the type of work he’s doing …”

From the center of the crowd, Gaillard answers questions about “sonfather” with a newfound confidence that even he is not used to. Adjusting his wire frame glasses, he explains to a visitor that the piece “questions the significance of the autonomous photographic gesture.” He often uses words like “moment,” “gesture,” and “context” when discussing his art, because he sees his life in dramatic terms, defining it by a series of moments, gestures, and contexts. Born on Nantucket in 1979, Gaillard was raised by strong women and grew up around a rotating cast of unstable men. When he was a boy, his mother, Maia (who he calls Mai and who requested to go by her first name), explained why she was so strict with him. “Your granddad committed suicide,” she said. “[Your stepfather, my father, and my mother’s father] are alcoholics. You don’t have a lot of good role models in your life, so I’m mom, dad, grandma, and uncle rolled into one.” Gaillard had the foresight, even as a young boy, to say, “Wow, I’m really at the butt end of this.”

To a certain degree, “this” started with his paternal grandmother, Gwen Gaillard, a glamorous and sardonic woman, a mythic figure in Gaillard’s life and Nantucket lore. After she left her first husband, Lyman Bloomingdale, one of the founding brothers of Bloomingdales, she married Gaillard’s grandfather, Harold, and opened the Opera House in 1946. The restaurant was an island institution, where guests such as Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland dined. Yet the Gaillard family romance with high society did not last. Harold committed suicide in 1972, and a few years later, his son, Michael Sr., was institutionalized for what doctors believed was bipolar disorder. “They just threw psychotropic drugs at him like he was a drug testing machine,” recalls Maia, who married Michael Sr. in 1978. Gaillard was five years old when his parents divorced (each has been married four times), and he moved to Sonoma with his mother, then a graphic designer, and his stepfather, an artist and alcoholic with a penchant for marijuana and mustaches. Equating drunken times with happy times, Gaillard grew up with illusions of a more perfect world waiting for him on Nantucket with his father, who worked as a scalloper, taxi driver, and massage therapist — who represented to Gaillard the “the voice of the heart, the shaman.”

This tension between the father of Gaillard’s fantasies and the man of reality is central to his work. He does not simply take photographs to better understand his past, and “sonfather” isn’t simply the portrait of a troubled man. He is on a quest to deconstruct photography as a medium, to unpack the relationship between the photographer, the photographed image, and the photograph itself. Fighting against preconceived notions of what photography is and how it functions, he examines the spaces between the self and the idea of the self, the past and the future, the photographic object and the object photographed. This fascination with extremes stems, in part, from a life lived at extremes.

Throughout high school, Gaillard downplayed his intelligence to gain acceptance, and during his freshman year at Stanford, he traded his education for parties and women. With a head full of dreadlocks, he dropped out and spent a year on Nantucket and in Costa Rica. Gaillard graduated in 2003 (in five years, not four) with a close group of friends and the Leo Holub Award for Excellence in Photography. Still, he struggled to claw his way out from his past. Moving to New York City in the summer of 2004, he began what Maia calls a “terrifying, terrifying” time.

Like many middle-class twentysomethings who arrive in New York City after college, Gaillard led a fast-paced lifestyle. When he wasn’t out, he and his roommate, Josh Howes, were writing a screenplay, and when they weren’t writing, they were unwinding in a local bar until 4:00 am. “There were always people there,” says Howes, still a writer and close friend. “It was a huge drug den. We were so innocent that we didn’t notice.” Gaillard devoted little time to photography, and the alcohol, stress, and lack of sleep took a toll. “He looked like he aged ten years,” Maia recalls. In late 2005, Gaillard’s apartment building was condemned, and on his last night there, he had to climb up the side of the building and break in through the back porch. The next morning, he woke up on an empty mattress, a snowdrift forming nearby. It was a turning point. “Without his art,” Howes says, “I don’t know, I think he would have absolutely ended up …” He struggles to finish the sentence.

Gaillard’s anchor during these years was his maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Oldham, 82, who lives on Nantucket and works at the Nantucket Historical Association. Island life and artistic genes run thick in her veins. To Gaillard, she was a force, and to Maia, she was a lifesaver: “My mother was . . . important, because she didn’t judge him,” she says. “I don’t know what I or Michael would have done without her.”

From the hallway outside Gaillard’s art studio, his wife, Brett, listens to him explain the significance of “sonfather” to another guest. As an architect, she brings a critical eye to his art. “He’s getting much better at talking about his work,” she says, running her hands over her low ponytail. In black ankle boots and a demure dress of grays, reds, and blues, she is a short package of dimpled sophistication. “He does big masculine gestures but in a sensitive, elegant, subtle way. That doesn’t happen that often.”

Gaillard is known for that exact combination, plus a heavy dose of generosity. In his early years in New York City, he waited tables at the high-end restaurants Kittichai and Megu, made from $600 to $1400 a week, and spent much of it on friends. At his bachelor party this fall, he pre-paid part of the bill. These days, he gives Brett centuries old, nautical-themed birthday presents: a compass (for direction), a brass propeller (for propulsion), a spyglass (for vision). In many ways, she is his ballast, and so the gifts say more about how she has altered the course of his life.  Of course, Gaillard will forever be linked to his father.  ”He’s still a profound influence on me, and without him, none of this art would happen,” he says.  “sonfather” reveals striking physical similarities between this father who often acts like a son, and this son who often plays the role of a father, but Gaillard is forging his own path, with Brett’s support.

* * * *

In thick black cursive, the words “starboard” and “port” are written vertically across two photographs taken from the Hy-Line ferry, which travels between Nantucket and Hyannis. The letters stand out against the sparkling yet muted haze of blues, grays, and whites. At 30 inches by 37.5 inches, the framed photos are a commanding presence, and despite clean, simple colors, they are a study in opposition. The camera focuses on the glass, not the view behind it. The light sky and dark water in the starboard photo contrast the dark sky and light water in the port photo.

“What is the significance of these?” a petite brunette asks, nodding toward “Legacy.”

“It has a very long story,” Gaillard says, much as he begins any explanation of his art. “The water collected on this glass becomes the salt remnants on this glass,” he begins, pointing from starboard to port. “It’s about circular patterns.” The words are read from bottom to top and left to right; the ferry leaves and returns; the water accumulates and dries during the journey. Gaillard has also hung the photographs in reverse order, with port (the left side of the boat) on the right and starboard (the right side of the boat) on the left, forcing you to reconsider your location and his. “Legacy” is about “the study of identity, says Gaillard’s friend Eriko Amino, an artist and former teacher. “It’s how you locate yourself in the center of your life, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.”

She’s right. No Gaillard work would be complete without a piece of family history, and this one surprises the petite brunette asking questions: “My grandfather jumped off the Nantucket ferry with bricks in his backpack,” he says, “so that’s another level of significance.” The young woman turns out to be an art collector (who prefers to go unnamed). After attending last year’s Open Studios, she is back to scout new talent — and is enraptured by Gaillard’s art. “His work stands apart because he operates in a lot of different mediums.” She is referring to installation pieces such as “My mirrors your eyes,” a white sculpture made from wood, glass, and mirror that hangs on the wall opposite “sonfather.” As you look into the rectangular mirror, you try to decipher the phrase written on the glass: “If you can’t see my mirrors I can’t see you.” It’s impossible to read the words and the reflections simultaneously, and yet as you strive to do so, “sonfather” is reflected in the background, still watching.

“I think he meshes together an aspect of conceptual art and a level of realism,” the art collector continues. “I see influences of Roni Horn and other well-known photographers.” Gaillard insists that his inspiration comes from within, though he would blush at the compliment; Horn, whose work is currently on display at the Whitney Museum, uses multiple mediums to explore identity, place, and the relationship between object and subject. While Gaillard admires a “pantheon” of artists, including Walker Evans, Bruce Nauman, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, he prefers not to place his art within an historical or contemporary context. “I don’t want to say that it’s unique. I mean, it just comes from me, and whatever kind of influence from other artists [is] present in the work, is a very unconscious one.”

Gaillard has worked hard to stitch together his life and his art — to make the narrative digestible. A turning point came when he was pursuing a Post-Baccalaureate degree at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. (The program, which he began in 2006 and completed in 2007, was his response to his tumultuous years in New York.) After producing a collection of stunning and lonely cityscapes, a professor challenged him: “So you can make beautiful pictures. Why? What does that mean?”

Gaillard remembered these questions a few months later, in April 2007, when he learned that a close friend had committed suicide. While visiting the family in Sonoma, he was bombarded with photographable images: the urn, NASCAR paraphernalia, the gigantic head of an elk that his friend’s father had killed. Gaillard was unmoved. “I realized I’m not interested in … producing this window into another time or another moment. … That was the first time I discovered that, or at least articulated it.”  Instead, Gaillard photographed a series of educational signs he discovered during a visit to his elementary school playground. Conveying the landscape of childhood angst that contributed to his friend’s downfall, they launched Gaillard’s formal investigation into the social and linguistic tools people use to construct narrative. Something significant happened: “I took these photographs for me and didn’t once consider their audience.” Suddenly, he cared enough about his art to stop caring.

* * * *

At first glance, “Expanded Field” looks like four messy black circles arranged horizontally on a wall, one next to the other, each a slightly different shape and size. This is the kind of photography that makes people who don’t know a lot about art feel uncomfortable and confused. To a certain extent, the images don’t even look like photographs. Yet as the crowd in Gaillard’s studio thickens during Open Studios, people stop to stare at the white wall with black circles. Unlike “sonfather” and “Legacy,” which are accessible, familiar, and linked to Gaillard’s past, the circles seem to breathe on their own, stripped of the history that bleeds, trauma by trauma, into his other works.

To create “Expanded Field,” Gaillard painted four semicircles onto drawing paper with oil-based black paint, orienting each one in a different position on the page: top, bottom, right, and left. He then photographed the images using precise lighting and a Schneider Componon, a lens so sharp that, in the 1950s, photographers had to register it with the FBI to prevent accusations of counterfeiting. Each semicircle represents what Gaillard calls the original gesture, the form that determines the shape of the circle. To complete the work, he printed the images and closed each circle by painting onto the photos with the same black paint, letting the oil seep into the photographic surface, degrading it over time.

“If it weren’t for Open Studios, [“Expanded Field”] never would have happened,” Gaillard says. “It’s going to prove to be a very important moment.” For the first time, he located himself in his art without alienating his audience and relying on his past to explain its significance. The original gestures within “Expanded Field” are reminiscent of the his personal journey, the series of memories, experiences, and traumas that determined the ways in which he lived, articulated, and even fabricated his life. “Expanded Field” tells that story, only without colors and beautiful vistas, and with details that emphasize paint and nuance over place and people.

A couple of weeks after Open Studios, Gaillard is back in his baggy jeans and black t-shirt, a fresh layer of stubble on his face. Sitting next to Brett, he sinks into the cushions on the couch in their apartment. Everything is tightly ordered and homey, with keepsakes from the Opera House, his stepfather, and Nantucket displayed alongside countless photographs, including one of Michael Sr. holding a surfboard, shirtless and tan, radiant, smiling, and alive, the man of Gaillard’s childhood dreams. While sipping a glass of white wine, he points to a card on the refrigerator and tells me to read it. Brett pokes him in the stomach for not getting it himself, smiling with the kind of love that says she never wants to not be his. On the cover of the card is a man walking off the roof of a building, supported only by a thin string he holds in his hands. Inside is a message: “My beloved Brett, without you I would never leave the roof.”

Sometimes Gaillard cannot grasp the fact that he has found love — and success. “I do think he’s afraid that this could all be a mirage,” says Howes. “That at any moment, someone could pull the rug out from him, and he could wake up back in that apartment with the snow falling on him, with no money and no prospects, or worse.” Gaillard always pushed forward — always completed the circles of his life on his terms. Howes thinks it’s because of his art: “He’s always had … secret grandiose dreams of being a great artist, and that … future has been a lifeline for him.” Maia agrees. “As a young person, Michael sought after predictability and didn’t get it. There was nothing predictable about his life, and I think that the fact that he’s not making predictable art is a reflection of how comfortable he is.”

Perhaps it’s true. Perhaps the man who fuses his art with the troubles of his past has finally found contentment. “Michael is somewhere,” reflects Thomas Roma, director of photography at the Columbia University School of the Arts. “He found himself somewhere. And so I walked [into his open studio] and had to reconsider work that I’d seen in the past because I saw it in a different light. … I’ve seen the arc of his development, where he’s gone with his artistic practice, and frankly, I was proud of him.” The footprints of Gaillard’s first and only Open Studios still linger. “It definitely felt like people were walking around in my heart,” he says. Of course, that’s the point of his art; walking into his studio is like walking into a living, breathing recreation of his life. It’s exactly where he wants his audience to be, but knowing where he will go next is another question entirely. As Gaillard’s close friend, Mike Taubman, says, “he’s found a port, a home — for the moment.”

By Nicola Shepheard

Dreamweaverr, Dineo Seshee Bopape, 2008

A young man in a pea-green coat and a felt hat stands at the mezzanine balcony and begins chanting: “Fig-ar-o, Figaro Figaro Fig-ar-ooo.” The din in the Studio Musuem Harlem lulls as people search for the source, wondering if it’s part of the show. The crier, Pedro Jimenez, notices Dineo Seshee Bopape standing nearby, grinning at him. He explains he was trying to get her attention. “I’m bubbling with excitement inside,” she tells him. She’s at the group show opening to support her friend Jabu Arnell. Bopape and her minstrel do a circuit of the show, stopping every few steps for Bopape to hug someone. She pauses before a 1987 work by African-American artist David Hammons called “Free Nelson Mandela,” the mythic face stenciled onto torn, layered billboard papers. “Ahh, home!” she sighs, touching her fist to her heart. But it is Demetrius Oliver’s “Asterism,” a black suitcase brimming with spherical light-bulbs and anthracite, a mineral coal with a silvery luster, that gets the biggest reaction. “I’m in love with this piece!” she exclaims. “Its materiality, it’s so concrete and so light as well. There’s this physical light that bounces off it; although it’s heavy, it has this lightness similtaneously.”

The idea of being “light but heavy” comes up often when Bopape talks about her own work. In its materials and ideas, it is suffused with a heavy lightness. Mostly she makes videos and room-like installations from everyday domestic objects, paper and fabric. She arranges reflective surfaces — mirrors, foil, tinsel — to trick light into performing for her. Installations are made for a specific space, then dismantled. She puts herself in many of the videos, sometimes semi-nude, sometimes in drag. For her video installation for a recent major New Museum group show, she turned herself into a shaman-figure of indeterminate gender and intentions. The lightness in her work comes from its shimmering, glittering, starburst surfaces, which look playful, fun, shot with pop culture and kitsch: balloons, party flags, safari imagery, pop-song references. The heaviness lies in the metaphysical and psychosexual questions you slowly realize that she’s poking at, the disarming intimacy of her self-exposure, and the weight of history she carries as a black South African woman who turned nine the year Mandela was released from prison. Much of her work messes with ideas of gender and race. But her art is not, primarily, political or feminist. It’s just that these are (some of) the ideas looping through Bopape’s mind.

The distinction is subtle but critical, both to get her and to her, because it places her inner world, and her attempts to come to terms with things, or crack them open, at the center of her art; rather than making her a depersonalized mouthpiece for her generation, or for young black African women, or a screen onto which non-Africans project their ideas about black African women — something she hates. She’s much more “Being John Malkovich” than “The Power of One.” “Walking into one of her installations is like walking into an overstuffed, claustrophobic space; like walking into Dineo’s head and being lost in this beautiful but chaotic environment,” says Capetown-based curator Storm van Rensburg.

For art historian Genevieve Hyacinthe, the chaos is often the debris of social norms and accepted wisdoms. Hyacinthe once included Bopape in a show she curated and now wants to write a book about her. Bopape puts her in mind of Swiss painter and sculptor Jean Tinguely, known for his kinetic sculptures that self-detonated in galleries. “I feel that she’s really blowing up modes of decorum and behaviors as a move of freedom,” Hyacinthe says. “She’s blowing up expected behaviors for a black woman, and the appropriate modes of critique for black women artists. Sometimes you want to level your past. I don’t know where she’s going but it feels like she’s blowing up some stuff to go somewhere new.”

***

Right now, in an Amsterdam gallery, you can walk into the beautiful debris from a messy break-up Bopape had following her two-year residency at the prestigious D’Ateliers artists’ institute in that city. “You Fucking Horrible Bitch!” at Mart House includes an eponymous series of seven paintings and “Love Strung,” a series of over 100 drawings inspired by Justin Timberlake’s song “Love Stoned,” which Bopape made in the break-up’s aftermath. The works are raw and often funny: vituperative outpourings, galpal-ish pep-talk, images of fireworks, high-heeled ponies and various phalluses. (The ex-girlfriend was “strangely charmed” by serving as Bopape’s muse.) The title painting, in ferociously dripping capitals, is displayed in the window. Gallery owner Andre Martens has seen passersby taking photos of it. Another text drawing is a certificate supposedly from an ex-lover for “the best blow job ever.” (A collector asked her out to dinner after seeing this in an earlier show. She declined.) Party decorations make reference to a 2008 break-up themed party/performance Bopape hosted in her Amsterdam studio, where she strung up boiled chicken hearts and arranged for actors posing as gallery-goers to repeatedly re-enact an argument she and her ex-girlfriend had via e-mail and online-chat, complete with acronyms such as LOL.

Showing me video clips in her Columbia University studio in Harlem, Bopape explains she was thinking about the roles you perform in a relationship. It had been her first lesbian relationship, and she was surprised to find herself acting out the stereotypical “wife” role. She was also thinking about the physical persistence of the past via memory. “I guess the actors were avatars,” she says. “I was thinking a lot about that word this morning: someone sitting in as you, a shadow of the real, how do you relive a memory? Where does the past go after it happened? It just sits within the normal everyday situation but it sits there invisible. The past is present in every situation; the memory sits with us in what is, for us, real space.”

The way Bopape talks about her own work is often speculative, musing, an unfurling of questions and possible answers. It’s as if she’s trying to figure it out, and re-figure it out, as she goes along. In person, Bopape is sensual, funny and generous. She loves dancing and reading psychoanalytic theory. She gives whole-body hugs and touches you on the arm. In New York, where she’s in the final year of her M.F.A. program at Columbia University, her look is vintage thrift-shop and hand-me-down with canvas sneakers and cropped orange-to-black dreadlocks. (Before settling on art, she wanted to be a fashion designer, and even designed her cousin’s brides’ maid dresses at age eleven.) Her walk and gestures are flowing, unhurried. She pauses to think. You get the sense that she’s somehow open at the edges, semipermeable. Joost Bosland, who works at Bopape’s South African gallerist, Michael Stevenson Gallery, likened it to being on V, the fictional perception-heightening drug in the television series “True Blood.” “I’ve walked with her around the streets in New York and she’ll notice something that I’ll walk past,” he says. She also knows her mind. “She doesn’t take shit from anybody,” remarks independent curator Melissa Mboweni. “She’s secure but that also has to do with knowing where you come from.”

While living in Amsterdam, Bopape became outraged by a Dutch festival tradition of white people painting themselves in black face and red lips. She wrote “Your Racism Hurts” on a placard and staged a one-woman protest. Reactions ranged from support to “go home”-type jeering; one driver accelerated towards her. “People were saying the festival was part of their tradition that, something that was valued, I said yeah, slavery was valued for a long time, apartheid was too.”

***

Bopape was politicized at an early age. As a ten-year-old she would accuse her teacher of marking the black students harder than the white students at a newly integrated public school. She grew her nails to fight other children. She sang the Black South African national anthem under her breath to the apartheid version. Matlakala Bopape, now a regional director for the University of South Africa, says her daughter was protective of her three older brothers and her friends. “She was a very peaceful girl but when she grew up and saw how the country was and how things were she couldn’t stand back and it let go, so she was fighting for herself and other people.”

Dineo spent her early childhood in the Seshego township in Polokwane in northern South Africa. The family’s three-bedroom home was one of the “big houses” in the township, although there were more affluent families. Children played on the street, neigbors knew each other. The family moved to England for two and a half years when Dineo was five, for her parents’ master degrees. The township children were intimidated by her English accent and the black dolls she brought home (you could buy only white dolls in South Africa). Around the time Mandela was released, the family moved to the suburbs. Her parents, both teachers, were African National Congress (ANC) members. Dineo remembers the parties, the pride, and then the trauma at violence between the ANC and the majority-Zulu Inkatha Freedom party supporters. In the suburbs, racism was “in your face,” she recalls. “Swearing, people trying to bump you with their cars, setting their dogs on you.”

Her frame of reference was always wider than Polokwane, though. The family had many visitors from overseas. “She was exposed to the world while she was still young,” says her mother. “She’s been able to see different worlds, that has made her what she is.”

Longing for sisters, Bopape went to a girls’ boarding school in Durban. Later, she would mimic her plummy teachers in the video work “Round One,” which has the smart, stealthily funny, enwrapping affirmation and bubbling-up of celebration that is in much of her work. Although frustrated at her drawing style — “lines everywhere, really aggressive, expressive” — she kept winning art prizes at high school, and during a gap-year in England, decided to become an artist. She informed her parents she would put herself through art school if they wouldn’t help. Suddenly her fashion designer ambition didn’t look so bad to her mathematician father Mathume, who had wanted her to be a scientist, but she dug her heels in and went to art school.

Directly after apartheid ended South African art became hot. By the time Bopape started art school some of the heat had gone out of it, but among African art, South African art still attracts the most international attention. Durban, where Bopape studied, was a cradle for creatives and activists. The nation has a strong tradition of overtly political art, which is still being produced, but Bopape’s generation is exploring different territory. Explains van Rensberg: “There’s much more scope for artists to work in less political ways — work’s becoming much more personal, with a complexity of subject matter, and also the freedom to not be constrained by the big narratives, the big Truth.”

At the same time African identity, for Africans living on and beyond the continent, is being reimagined. Cameroonian, Johannesburg-based social scientist Achille Mbembe has defined Afropolitanism as “an aesthetic and a particular poetic of the world. It is a way of being in the world, refusing on principle any form of victim identity — which does not mean that it is not aware of the injustice and violence on the continent and its people by the law of the world.”

There are two conflicting stories about post-apartheid South Africa. The optimistic one is about progressive laws, a functioning democracy, new malls and casinos, and the 2010 World Cup. The other story is about poverty, xenophobia, violent crime, and especially sexual violence. Daily life is unchanged for many South Africans. Artists will reflect the tensions between these two stories, argues Johannesburg-based curator Khwezi Gule, whether their work is cause-driven or not. It was the non-obvious but transcendent politics in Bopape’s entry for last year’s MTA New Contemporaries Award that helped win her over to Gule, who was one of the judges. Her winning entry was an installation called “Grass Green/Sky Blue, Grass Green/Sky Blue (because you stood in the highest court in the land insisting on your humanity).” The subtitle refers to a family friend of South African president Jacob Zuma who accused him of raping her. Zuma was acquitted of the rape in 2006, before he became president. He claimed the sex was consensual, and that the woman’s wearing of a kanga (wrap-around skirt) proved she wanted to sleep with him. The woman was harassed and vilified by Zuma supporters, and now lives in exile.

Grass green/sky blue, Dineo Seshee Bopape, 2008

Grass green/sky blue, detail, Dineo Seshee Bopape 2008

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Bopape’s work evoked a girlie safari wonderland. There was a stage covered by Astroturf, jungle-print linoleum, artificial flowers, umbrellas, sky-blue party flags, shiny fabric and pictures of wild animals. A video played of long grass in the wind. Gule’s initial impression was of something “flippant, frivolous … I was thinking she may be making a critique of Africa as a place of wild animals and safaris. The thing was very light-hearted and joyous, then I went to read the title and I realized it was actually about the person who accused Jacob Zuma, how this woman had been humiliated.”

Bopape explains she’d been reading a book about South African female public figures and had wondered how history would remember this woman. So she made the work as a kind of allegory. “As a result of all the trauma of it, maybe it’s an attempt to forget the story; the rape itself became perhaps less important than the fact that she’s had the courage to take him to court.”

***

Place of the Object, Dineo Seshee Bopape, 2009

Bopape walks into her studio, flicks on the light, and says, “Something’s missing. I don’t know what.” It’s open studio day at Columbia University, when the public and gallery scouts get a preview of the graduate students’ work. Bopape has four installations on display. Along the front wall is “The Place of the Object”: a flimsy barricade of wooden posts, opalescent plastic, fabric, tasseled light shades, mirrors and foil wrapped around central heating pipes. Nearby, a video plays of her friend on a boat singing a sad love song in Turkish, framed by a board covered in purple hologram wrapping paper and festooned with fake green grapes. An unfinished video of the artist’s fragmented body plays on a desk covered with Astroturf. The piece that’s bothering Bopape incorporates her earlier video work called “Happy Hour,” a comment on forced cheerfulness for which she got six actors to laugh for an hour in an Amsterdam basement-turned-bar (audience reactions varied from laughter to discomfort). The manic energy is amplified by sped-up, jumpy editing. Surrounding the video monitor is a tatty, sparkley jumble: a stained toaster, pink sequins pooled in a cardboard ring, mirrors, a lamp, a gold mat, fake plants and print-outs of flower photos. A sign reads “the performance will commence in 20 minutes thank you for your patience.” (Later, whenever viewers asked when the performance would start, Bopape simply replies, “In 20 minutes.”) She quickly lays a floral fabric square on the gold mat, then some half-folded yellow and blue tent-striped plastic, a half-unrolled strip of Astroturf, and finally a print-out image of a big pink flower. Not perfect, but closer.

Bopape’s artistic process is one of discovery: elliptical and organic, contemplative, percolative. Ideas come from notebooks of drawings, conversations and observations. Once, a long-distance bus conversation with a woman with limited English led to a video work called “I Like.” It shows a close-up of her mouth saying what she likes. Like the bus conversation, it says a lot in simple English. The repetitive structure and Bopape’s warm, low voice is hypnotic: “I like my e-mail address, I like my family, I like my friends … I like feeling good, I like feeling helpful, I like feeling honest, I like milkshakes.” The ending arrives like a kind of absolution: “I like having a crush on somebody, I like walking in the streets without being harassed, I like feeling safe.”

“She uses the video with a sophisticated aggression that pulls you in with charm, but mocks you at the same time,” artist Marlene Dumas has said. Jon Kessler, one of Bopape’s mentors, believes her approach to video is her greatest strength. “It’s very much her own — that’s what every artist is looking for, the holy grail of making art, a distinctive style that is not like anything you’ve ever seen.” He points to the video installation Bopape made for last summer’s inaugural young artists’ triennial at the New Museum, “The Generational: Younger than Jesus.” Playing with distorted views of Africanness, it shows Bopape as an indeterminate shaman figure in a plastic-bag-cloud skirt and fake beard, holding a broken white umbrella. Trance-like, she/he dances. The refrain from the song “That Old Black Magic” loops. Her inclusion in the show has nudged up her profile, and today her work is fetching from $290 for a drawing to $4300 for a large painting. Kessler says the New Museum installation crystallized her strengths. “She’s referring to being an African artist in a distanced way. It’s super-super smart. And of the moment. She doesn’t make boring videos, she grew up on MTV and she has that desire to entertain and that’s not a bad thing.”

Bopape says she wanted to embody ambiguity. “This shaman character who’s both male and female, is this person a joker or are they sinister?” Cross-dressing and nudity are recurring motifs. In the slideshow “Silent Performance,” we see her wearing a bra, sock-stuffed mens briefs and a fake moustache. (One of her brothers once told her she looks better without facial hair.) Bopape is seen as brave for her physical and emotional self-exposure. Hyacinth: “There’s this norm in art history that the female body is a white female body. Dineo is brave — she presents her body in different provocative ways, different modes of display. She bares it all for her work.” But Bopape tells me she wishes she were braver, that she could put more of herself into her work. What’s holding her back? “Every work is a way to speak to, uncover thoughts, or to release thoughts,” she says, “and sometimes it takes time to come to terms with certain ideas or to open them up or to digest.”

Her latest artist statement says she aims “to yield to a lust of surface, light, color, sound … ” and to create physical objects that “ooze with misplaced sensuality, sadness, violence, desolation and happiness as do the videos.” It goes on: “personal/privatised dramas are teased out, sometimes close to oblivion, to arrive at … an orchestral discordant mess/harmony of small stories told in/light, sound, colour, space and language.” At a basic level, for Bopape, art is about communicating. She doesn’t want to be didactic, but is troubled when people find meanings she did not intend, or when something meant as critical starts conspiring with its object. “It’s a vulnerability that’s very close to the surface when her work is on show,” says van Rensburg. “Things are so emotionally connected that it’s sometimes very difficult for her to process when people don’t understand or don’t get it. That throws her completely.”

A video of her squishing her breasts together to a soundtrack of groaning and heavy-breathing was for her a psychosexual drama of ecstasy and pain, aggression and passivity, but was read by some people as a comment on the black female body. “I wasn’t speaking about blackness or whiteness,” she says.

Bopape plans to stay in New York for a few years after graduating, and is applying for an artist’s residency at the Studio Museum Harlem, which exhibits only black artists. The tensions and freedoms of being African out of Africa will keep feeding into her art. “She fits but she doesn’t fit: that’s the predicament that she finds herself in,” says Mboweni. “The rawness of that she captures in her work makes her that much more attractive. She’s sexy, her language is sexy.” Such is the brightly intelligent, saucy pleasure of the peepshow into Bopape’s mind that is her art: like light flashing off water, it’s the heady sensation of finding lightness in heaviness and heaviness in light.

Dreamweaverr, Dineo Seshee Bopape, 2009 (photo by Benoit Pailley)

By Nicola Shepheard

At 7:00 p.m. on a damp Thursday, the stairway to the East Village Yoga to the People studios is busier than the nearest subway station. Soon, all four studios will be full, mats toe to fingertip. The third-storey studio where I find myself funneled has the feel of a student cafe: wooden floors, exposed brick walls, music, people chatting; except there are also people with their feet in the air. None of the hushed, solemn preparations you get in some studios. What is most striking, though, in this age of yoga mega-chains and couture yoga-wear, is there are no fees. Instead, official greeter Jessie Barr stands at the door with an empty tissue box, its mouth widened into a guileless smile. This is where you put your donation – the website yogatothepeople suggests $10 per class, but no one’s counting. Jessie cheerfully averts her eyes from the five-dollar bill I drop in.

Donation-based yoga feels almost subversive. Last decade’s yoga renaissance sun-saluted the ancient practice out of draughty church halls and onto the cover of Time magazine. In 2008, Americans spent $5.7 billion on classes and products, 87 percent more than in 2004, according to a study by Yoga Journal. Yoga now has celebrity teachers, international chains, and merchandise by Nike. Marc Jacobs makes a $400 yoga mat bag; model Christy Turlington has a line of yoga wear. Critics have pointed out that yoga’s ethos sits uneasily with inhibitive pricing, militant ascetism and vigorous, slick branding. Some fear a Starbucks-style standardization that will swallow up community studios and gut yoga of its spirituality. Donation-based yoga is, you could argue, the ultimate rearguard action.

When Yoga To The People founder Greg Gumucio started teaching in 1996, yoga was as rare and esoteric as quinoa. Then, it was enough to simply have a studio. As more studios opened, to compete he had to choose good locations. Later, the edge came from good teachers.

“The next evolution from that was you had to have a studio that was connected to more than the business of yoga, you had to have a yoga that was connected to the community and the people,” says Gumucia. He adopted the concept of donation-based yoga from a friend, Bryan Kest, who teaches power yoga in Santa Monica, California. The East Village studios were opened February 2006, followed by a Berkeley, California studio last year. Some 800 people a day now go to the East Village classes, which run year-round. Gumucio says a Brooklyn studio will open in coming months. He won’t divulge the average donation, but says the income is enough to keep the studios running.

Donation-based yoga sits within a mesh of cultural movements such as slow-food and simple living that emphasize community over pseudo-individualistic brand-identification, simplicity over complication, and frugality over excess. Canadian yoga writer and instructor Roseanne Harvey started teaching a donation-based yoga class at a local community mission in 2007. “I saw that yoga was presented with very little diversity: the predominant images were of white, fit women between the ages of 25 and 35. So I wanted to offer an alternative to the dominant cultural story.”

Harvey, who writes a yoga blog, says a second, pay-what-you-wish class attracts more students and artists. “I was just responding to something that I saw around me. I follow and am familiar with the slow food and simple living movements, though I’m more influenced by the anti-consumerism and DIY movements.”

Yoga To the People’s manifesto could come from the pages of anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters: “There will be no correct clothes There will be no correct payment…No glorified teachers No ego no script no pedestals No you’re not good enough or rich enough This yoga is for everyone.” Explains Gumucio, “Not making it about teachers is a big deal. You’ll find no profiles of teachers, no teacher schedules, the idea is to get people commited to their own practice.”

The class lives up to its anti-hype. The teacher coaxes and guides and coos us into our practice. Nick Drake and Paul Simon ease our minds. We’re told to close our eyes so we can’t compare ourselves to the person in front. We work hard, but softly.

Afterwards, I ask stage actor Carl Danielsen, 47, why he comes here. (He averages five times a week. “I’m insane about it! It’s a little obsessive.”)

He’s been to many other yoga classes, here and abroad, but this is unique, he says.

“It’s the energy, there’s a seriousness but at the same time it’s fun. During svanasana [hands and knees] today I heard someone say ‘fuck.’ That’s so great, I love that! Why are we getting all religious and sacrosanct and serious?”

Danielsen is reflecting another important facet of this nascent movement’s appeal. The demand for work to be fun and informal is often tagged to the Gen Y cohort, but it runs much wider than that – check out ads targeting Baby Boomer. Strip away the pricey pretentiousness and the faux-asceticism, and yoga becomes serious pleasure that anyone can enjoy.

Namaste.

]]> http://othergroundny.com/2009/12/01/the-peoples-yoga/feed/ 1